Diet-related health issues have become one of the top global public health issues. In the past couple of decades, there has been a dramatic surge in obesity and other diet-related health issues. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), in 2011-2012 69% of all American adults age 20 and over were overweight and more than one third of American adults were obese. Obesity can lead to many health issues such as for example cardiovascular diseases, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cancers, respiratory problems, gallbladder disease and reproductive complications. While there may be multiple factors leading to or contributing to obesity, one critical factor is a person's behavior as it relates to food intake.
Over the years, several attempts have been made to track food and nutrition intake. One common way for a person to track their food intake is to maintain a written diary. There are several issues with this approach. First of all, the accuracy of human-entered information tends to be limited. Secondly, maintaining a written diary is cumbersome and time-consuming, causing many users to drop out after a short period of time. Thirdly, there is no mechanism for real-time feedback. Fourthly, they do not provide any insights into important aspects of eating behavior, such as the pace of eating.
More recently, software, typically installed on or accessed from a tablet, mobile phone, laptop or computer, can be used to facilitate the logging and tracking of a person's food intake. Such software applications typically utilize a database that contains nutrient and caloric information for a large number of food items. Unfortunately, devices and software to facilitate food journaling are often times cumbersome to use and require a lot of human intervention, such as manual data entry or look up. They are furthermore mostly focused on food intake content and portion tracking and do not provide insight into other aspects of eating behavior such as the number of bites or the pace of eating. They also lack the ability to provide real-time feedback about eating habits or behavior.
Devices and methods that attempt to reduce the burden of manual data entry or data look-up exist and provide another approach to obtaining log data about food consumption. As an example, tableware and utensils with built-in sensors have been proposed to track food intake more automatically. For example, a plate with integrated sensors and circuitry might automatically quantify and track the content of food that is placed on the plate. Similarly, integrated sensors in a drinking vessel might identify, quantify and track the contents of liquid in the cup. In another example, an eating utensil includes sensors that count the number of bites taken by a person using the eating utensil. These methods might fall short in not being able to automatically identify and quantify the content of the food being consumed and also only apply to a limited set of meal scenarios and dining settings and are not well suited to properly cover the wide range of different meal scenarios and dining settings that a typical person may encounter during a day.
Being able to handle a wide variety of meal scenarios and settings is important for seamless and comprehensive food intake tracking. A method based on an eating utensil may not be able to properly track the intake of drinks, snacks or finger foods and such methods may also interfere with a person's normal social behavior. For example, it might not be socially acceptable for a user to bring their own eating utensils to a restaurant or a dinner at a friend's house.
Devices and methods have been described that quantify and track food intake based on analysis of images of food taken by a portable device that has imaging capabilities, such as an app that runs on a mobile phone or tablet that has a camera. Some devices might use spectroscopy to identify food items based on their molecular makeup. Such devices may use crowd sourcing and/or computer vision techniques, sometimes complemented with other image processing techniques, to identify a food item, estimate its nutritional content and/or estimate its portion size. However, many of these devices and methods are fond lacking in usability and availability in certain social settings.
While today's spectroscopy technology has been sufficiently miniaturized to be included in portable devices, devices based on spectroscopy do have a number of significant issues. First of all, such devices require a significant amount of human intervention and cannot be easily used in a discreet way. In order to produce an accurate spectrograph measurement, the person eating is required to hold the spectrometer for a few seconds close to or in contact with each food item they desire to identify. Since the light generated by such portable spectrometers can only penetrate up to a few centimeters into the food, multiple measurements are required for food items that do not have a homogeneous composition and thus a portable spectrometer would not work well for sandwiches, layered cakes, mixed salads, etc. Such human intervention is intrusive to the dining experience and may not be acceptable in many dining settings.
Improved methods and apparatus for food intake monitoring and analysis are needed.